In India, farmer producer organizations (FPOs) promote collective action among small and marginalized farmers, especially women. By facilitating resource pooling and coordination of production activities, improving market access, and providing training and extension, FPOs can contribute to higher agricultural incomes for smallholder farmers. Women’s FPOs also help formalize women’s roles in agriculture, offer them remunerative employment, and enhance their engagement across the value chain.

The slow, limited, and uneven progress on women’s empowerment and gender equality over the last decade clearly shows that rural transformation, with its focus on efficiency and productivity, is leaving women behind in addition to having negative impacts on the environment and nutrition. New inclusive models of rural transformation are called for. The study argues that treating gender equality and women’s empowerment as key in the process of rural transformation will lead to a more inclusive and resilient transformation of rural spaces.

Gender inequalities remain deeply entrenched in many agri-food systems (AFS), limiting the potential of women—especially those from agriculture-dependent communities—to be empowered and to build social and economic resilience to climate change challenges. The Harnessing Gender and Social Equality for Resilience in Agri-food Systems (HER+) initiative will generate learning and evidence on where and how to intervene at a deeper level to disrupt the foundations of inequality in AFS. This effort requires high-quality data.

There is a push toward natural, chemical-free farming in India, reflected in the National Mission on Natural Farming (NMNF). Working to promote on-farm bio-input preparations and agro-ecological practices, the NMNF notably prioritizes working among “traditionally low or no fertilizer input users… generally confined to hilly, tribal, high forestland districts,” ostensibly viewing these areas as more amenable to chemical-free farming.

Njuki et al., (2021) find that women’s leadership and decision-making at all levels constitute a particularly underresearched pathway to gender equality and justice in agri-food systems. To respond to this knowledge gap, this study investigates if and how voluntary sustainability systems (VSS) contribute to women’s meaningful participation, representation and leadership in agri-food systems.

Prominent climate change events such as heavy rainfall, windstorms, heatwaves, and drought pose detrimental effects on the livelihoods and resilience of women and men actors in agri-food systems (AFS). This study explored the difference in coping mechanisms employed by women and men cassava smallholder farmers in the face of such climate change adversities.

Inadequate and poor-quality feed resources constrain livestock production that compromises the livelihoods dependent on livestock in low- and middle-income countries. Several forage varieties have been developed, targeting smallholder farmers in developing countries, yet the level of adoption remains low, particularly among women farmers. Adoption of varieties could enhance livelihoods by increasing livestock productivity and by providing income from the sale of surplus forage. Evidence on gendered barriers to, and incentives for, adoption of forage varieties is scarce.

Research on gender inequality in seed systems has underscored the need to build more inclusive interventions. For gender-transformative (GT) interventions in seed systems to succeed, there is urgent need to test new models which should be guided by empirical evidence. We present findings from research that unraveled the underlying causes that prevent women and youth from actively participating and benefiting as cassava seed entrepreneurs (CSEs). This study underpins the designing and testing of GT interventions as part of the Muhogo Bora cassava seed systems project in Tanzania.

Women play an important role in agriculture and account for around 50% of the agricultural labor force in Asia. Strong evidence exists to prove that women farmers have less access to land, inputs, labor and information compared to men, which, in turn, can influence technical efficiency in farms, that is the effectiveness with which a given set of inputs is used to produce output. Strong reasons indicate that women’s empowerment may contribute to enhancing technical efficiency, most notably through improvements in women’s access to human, physical, and social capital.

Cassava's storage roots represent one of the most important sources of nutritional carbohydrates worldwide. Particularly, smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa depend on this crop plant, where resilient and yield-improved varieties are of vital importance to support steadily increasing populations. Aided by a growing understanding of the plant's metabolism and physiology, targeted improvement concepts already led to visible gains in recent years.

In the framework of the EU-RBA Joint Programme on Gender Transformative Approaches for Food Security and Nutrition (JP GTA), FAO, IFAD, WFP and the CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform developed “Guidelines for measuring gender transformative change in the context of food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture” aimed at enhancing the capacity of research and development partners to design, implement, monitor and evaluate gender transformative interventions.

Food system transformation requires efforts from diverse stakeholders. It involves clarifying roles and relationships, as well as mobilizing and connecting them.
On 20 February 2023, farmers, community leaders and representatives from the government, civil society and the private sector met in Kapsabet, a town in Nandi county, Kenya, to jointly develop a vision for the county’s food systems and share perspectives on entry points for initiating system change.